Letters and Numbers
by ginnyisdacoolest
Summary: Dominic Gîte, newcomer to Arkham Asylum, extraordinarily ordinary aside from an uncanny mathematical ability, is taken under the wing of the Riddler.
1. Chapter 1

In Arkham Asylum, the arrival of a new patient was generally accompanied by a great deal of excitement. More often than not they had been on the front of every newspaper that had realised that costumed crime sells. Unaccustomed to the amount of force the orderlies were happy to use, many at least resisted the attempts to introduce them to their new residence, if not actually fight tooth and claw against the men manhandling them. Such fights invariably ended with the unfortunate newcomer getting tranquilized, spending the next few days confined to their cell while the more seasoned patients gossiped about them.

So it came as a surprise to everyone when one morning a thin, forty-something man with glasses was sat in the recreation room quietly doing a Sudoku, with no fuss last night to indicate his arrival. He might as well have just popped into existence. But since opportunities for gossip cropped up relatively rarely in the asylum/jail house, the patients currently being held were unwilling to pass it up.

Absorbed in his puzzle, the man jumped visibly when a woman slid next to him, oozing sexual confidence. He looked up into a face unlike any other he'd ever seen in person, but like any Gotham resident was very familiar with. He realised now that the photos in the newspapers didn't do her vivid green complexion justice, or her eye-watering mass of red curls. Gîte was familiar with people's tendency to call anyone with even the slightest copper tinge to their hair 'red', but in this case no other adjective would suffice. Neither could a newspaper portray the alluring and yet wholly overwhelming scent that wafted from her, superficially sweet but with a disturbing acrid tang beneath.

Poison Ivy tilted his face towards her with a slender green digit beneath his chin. "And who might you be?" she said, enjoying immensely the terrified look quickly taking over the newcomer's face.

"Um, I...er..." he stammered, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. There was a whole sofa, why'd she have to sit so close?

Ivy gave a little laugh. She'd never get bored of how stupid she could make men act. "Your name?" she prompted.

"Oh, er, I'm Dominic. Gîte."

"Sorry?"

The two syllables seemed to send the man even further into himself, but he managed to repeat. "Gîte. It's, um, it's French."

Ivy laughed once more. Gîte laughed along with her, though more out of nerves than anything else. Wrapped up in the cringe-worthy moment, he was momentarily unaware that a third person was also laughing, a dry, crackling chuckle that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention. A hand rough with numerous criss-crossing scars came to rest on his shoulder.

"Pamela, it seems you are frightening our newest addition. I believe that is _my _job." Dominic's momentary feeling of relief dissolved at this last part. His head was again manipulated round by a finger under the jaw, so he was looking at beady, bloodshot eyes observing him carefully over a beak-like nose. The man's gaze flickered over him as though he were a specimen in a jar. Dominic squinted back; he had recognised Poison Ivy from the newspapers, but was having great difficulty figuring out who exactly the man currently dissecting him with his stare was.

As if reading his mind, Ivy laughed once more. "Well, look at that _Jonathan_. He doesn't recognise you. I guess that's what happens when you run around with a sack on your head." Of course! This was Scarecrow. He'd been brought here once again by Batman a few months back; he should have known he'd meet him here.

Jonathan Crane spotted the moment the new arrival realised who he was, as his eyes suddenly darted away from his, as though even looking at him would cause him some mortal injury. If his presence could still illicit that sort of response then perhaps his absence from the rogues scene wasn't having as bad an effect on his reputation as he'd suspected.

Although, he noted, this man appeared even more prone to cowering than most of Gotham. Even before he'd joined the conversation, the psychiatrist in Crane had noticed the man picking at the skin around his nails, which were already bitten down to stubs. Now he knew who he was, he was in danger of making himself bleed. What a very...contained way of expressing agitation.

Crane sat himself in the chair opposite, his brown eyes staying permanently locked on to Dominic's grey ones, even when Dominic backed down and looked away. He'd always thought staring contests were a childish and ineffective way of establishing dominance. Now he knew he was wrong

"So," he said, settling into the game of interrogate-the-newbie, "when did you arrive?" It was a simple question, but to Dominic it sounded like an accusation. Was that Scarecrow's intention or was he getting paranoid? He didn't think one man could make him question himself with so few words and so little time, but then again his was by no means the strongest of wills. Still, he mentally scolded himself for letting Crane get to him so quickly. After all, he'd probably be staying here with him indefinitely, unless the Master of Fear decided to break out.

"Last night," he managed to murmur apologetically, "you were all asleep, I, I didn't want to wake you..."

Once again, he found himself being laughed at in that crackling manner. "You mean you were afraid to wake us."

Dominic shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant and failing miserably, "If you like, I..."

"So what are you doing there," Poison Ivy cut him off, snatching the book of puzzles from his fidgeting fingers, "Sudoku?"

Relieved to be on a subject he felt comfortable with, Gîte nodded.

"But what's this?" she said, an emerald finger pointing lazily at the numbers pencilled in along the side of the rows.

"Oh that, I, I like to put a couple of add, subtract, multiply and divide signs in, and some brackets, and work out the answers," he said quickly, worried his new roommates would find it dull and interrupt him again, "it, um, it helps keep my mental arithmetic skills sharp."

To his surprise, both Ivy and Crane seemed at least mildly interested. Usually when he started talking about maths he either completely lost his audience or gained one keen to test his acclaimed abilities. It would seem his two new acquaintances were of the second school of thought.

"Go on."

"Well, I mean, for this row the answers were 1, 6, 5, 9, 8, 7, 4, 3 and 2. I put the first three in a bracket and multiplied them, then I added the next two," he glanced up to find Scarecrow's eyes still fixed on his, and he lost his flow for a second, "then I, um, I divided by the, the last four all added together."

"And...?"

"It, er, it came to 2.9375."

"How do you do that?" Poison Ivy said in his ear, her voice still subtly mocking, but also seemingly impressed.

"Well, I, I just think of it as a puzzle. Figure out all the little pieces and then put it all together. It's..._I_ find it interesting."

Crane and Ivy shared a significant glance.


	2. Chapter 2

The Riddler was many things, but he was most definitely not a morning person. Though, in his opinion, his brain functioned at three times that of the average person at any time of day, he found it most came to life around 11pm. When on the outside, he naturally shifted to being virtually nocturnal, which was one of the reasons why most of his heists were pulled at night. But inside Arkham, he was forced to be in his cell with not even a good book to keep him company. So up until recently he'd spent most of the few hours after lights out talking to whoever would listen, or rather anyone in the direct vicinity who either couldn't, or wouldn't, shut him up forcibly. Then his doctor had caught wind of it and starting quizzing him about his 'insomnia', and he'd had to start faking slumber to stop her dosing him with sleeping pills.

Thankfully, while an alarm rang every day at 7:30, the guards were much less inclined to drag patients out of their cells as they were to shove them in, so Edward could sleep in as he pleased. This did mean that in the case of Gîte, Nigma was up long after what he liked to call 'the newbie inquisition' was over. When he sauntered into the recreation room at half past ten: Scarecrow was hunched over an outdated and extensively scribbled-upon copy of 'The Gotham Times'; Poison Ivy was sat in her usual spot staring hungrily out at the weeds growing on the other side of the only just transparent windows, and the Ventriloquist had been guided in and was sitting in the corner, muttering to himself. Without moving his lips.

And Dominic Gîte had returned to his Sudoku, though he wasn't getting very far as every few seconds his eyes would wander away from the page to glance anxiously at his fellow inmates. Edward Nigma raised his eyebrows at Crane, who glared at him over his newspaper. He shrugged, and parked himself next to the worried man, leaning over to look at what he was doing. Dominic blinked at him from behind his spectacles, trying to figure out if he'd seen the man before, but presumably in costume. He had reddish hair and a distinctively crooked nose, both features Dominic should have been able to recognise, but, as with Scarecrow, his mind drew a blank.

"Don't take it personally, Ed," Poison Ivy teased from her seat by the window, "he didn't recognise Crane here either."

As if sensing that Dominic was currently running through all the masked criminals in his memory to try and fit 'Ed' to one of them, he said helpfully "Imagine me in a bowler hat. Green in colour. With a question mark on the front." The penny dropped at the last comment, which was undoubtedly Edward's intentions.

"You're...the Riddler?" Gîte said tentatively, posing it as a question, even though he was certain there were no other criminals sporting a question mark motif.

"And he finally gets it." the Master of Conundrums said patronisingly. Like Scarecrow, he seemed to be studying him, but while Crane had been judging Dominic, Nigma was looking at him like a logic puzzle, not too hard as to cause frustration, but challenging enough to be interesting. What Gîte didn't realise was that, just as he'd checked the Riddler's traits against his memory in hope of placing him, Edward was trying to remember seeing the man's receding hairline, glasses or pointed noise before.

"So," he said, taking the puzzle book and pen from Gîte's trembling hands and flicking through to try and find a cross word he hadn't completed yet, "I don't believe I've seen you on any front pages of..."

"His name's Dominic Gîte, he's a maths teacher, and he's as gimmick-less as baking soda," Crane interrupted, grinning wickedly at robbing Nigma of his chance to pry for answers. "Oh, and he's _clever_." he added, as though throwing a bone between two dogs and waiting to see what would happen.

The Riddler's eyes narrowed. "Clever how?"

Dominic squirmed in his seat; he'd thought the questioning was over, but it seemed he was mistaken. "Just, I, I just do mental arithmetic."

"What's 14 times 34?" Crane asked, loving every second of this. Ed was just too easy to wind up.

"I..." he looked to Edward Nigma for a sign as to whether or not answering the question was a bad idea. But his latest inquisitor looked like he was waiting for his answer too, so he said quietly "Four hundred and seventy six."

Edward frowned for a moment, then quickly scribbled on the back of the puzzle book for about half a minute, before muttering "So it is."

He looked so threatened by the result that Dominic found himself blurting "I mean, it's not really difficult. I-it's just a trick, I just learned a system for working it out." He hadn't, though. He'd always been able to see how numbers fit together and come to an answer in seconds. But he always told people it was a trick, to avoid appearing arrogant.

For a second Nigma looked like he was going to question him further, but then relaxed, satisfied with Gîte's answer.

"So," he said, writing absent-mindedly in the margins of the book, "you like maths?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Well, I, I like the fact that it has rules. It can never lie, and there's always an answer eventually." He looked down primly at his hands. In his opinion, it was only a shame people weren't like that.

"Ah, now there's how we differ. As I'm sure the papers will have made you aware, my great passion is language."

"Why?"

There came a mutter from Crane; Gîte couldn't quite make it out, but he swore he heard the phrase 'opened the floodgates' in there somewhere.

But Nigma's face had already lit up at the prospect of talking about his 'great passion.' "Why, because there's so much to play with! All the little parts of a language: the phonetics, the semantics, the pronouns, the sentence structure, all for our taking. You can mix it around, combine two languages, even make up your own words..."

Listening to Nigma talk, Gîte couldn't help mentally comparing him to the English teachers at his old work:

_There'd been one in particular, a former writer by the name of Rory Mirel, who had a habit of gesticulating and pacing when he talked about Shakespeare. Dominic had sat in on one of his classes once, and had been quite unnerved by his explanation of a particular soliloquy, although the students seemed enthralled. He'd noticed, not without considerable resentment, that even some of his worst students seemed to enjoy the lesson._

"_How do you do it, Mirel?" he'd asked afterwards, "How do you get them to listen to you?"_

"_There's no formula, if that's what you're wondering," he'd replied jovially, "you've just got to figure out what works for each kid. Sometimes you've gotta be subtle and sometimes you've gotta hit them over the head with it, understand what I'm saying?"_

_He hadn't, but he'd nodded anyway and left._

"Take your name for example." Gîte was jerked from his memories by Nigma addressing him directly.

"What about it?"

"Haven't you ever noticed it? Dominic Gîte."

Dominic looked bewildered, put on the spot to try and figure out what the Riddler was getting at. Edward rolled his eyes at his confusion.

"Need I spell it out? D. Gîte. Digit. _And _you're a math teacher. Perfect." He kissed the tips of his thumb and forefinger, as though complimenting a particularly tasty meal. Then with a definitely envious tone he added "You wouldn't even have to change it."

Realising what Nigma was getting at, Dominic shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Yes, well, I suppose it would be, if I wanted to lead that life..." he trailed off, eyeing the three masked criminals, unmasked before him.

Edward shrugged with what Gîte was sure was feigned indifference. "Ah well, your life. Does seem an awful shame to waste it, if you ask me."

The awkwardness was broken, but then replaced with a different form of tension, by a thundering yell from the end of the corridor.

"Nashton!"

Gîte made to look for the source of the yell, and spotted a formidable-looking security guard, before he was spun round by a sharp tug on his arm from Edward.

"Don't look," he insisted, his eyes firmly fixed on the wall.

"But he's calling you…" he protested as the guard hollered again.

"Yes, and we are ignoring him. Don't look."

"Why...?"

"To make a point, moron."

Perplexed, Dominic bit his lip and remained silent as the guard advanced.

"Nashton!" he said again, now mere feet from where they were sat, though his voice stayed at the same volume, "You're late for your appointment with Dr Parr."

With a deliberately mocking tone, the Riddler addressed the room: "Who's this Nashton fellow?"

Neither Poison Ivy nor Crane took any notice of his theatrics, but the guard growled – yes, actually growled – between his teeth. Then in a more resigned voice he said "Nigma?"

As if a switch had been flicked somewhere within him, Edward was all of a sudden attentive. "Yes?"

"Dr Parr wants you."

"Well I'd better get going, shouldn't I?" He grinned smugly as the guard took him by the arm and led him away. Apparently dissatisfied with having won that battle of wills, he added "You know, you've really got to stop calling me by the wrong name. One might question your mental faculties."

The smile dropped from his face as the guard, with no small amount of force, shoved him against the wall. The other two patients were suddenly interested, eager to see any violence that wasn't happening to them. Dominic found himself watching with similar fascination.

"You listen here _Nashton_," the guard snarled, "you ain't as crazy as you pretend to be, and I know it."

Edward's Adam's apple bobbed momentarily, and he opened his mouth to speak, but the guard cut him off.

"Now, I can't punch your lights out _here_, because it'd get me fired. But you give me one reason why I shouldn't next time I get the chance."

When Nashton replied, his voice was slightly higher pitched than before: "A-actually, I do have a good reason. You see, I've had my nose broken twice, once by my father and once by the Batman, and if it gets broken again I may well develop a deviated septum which would make my voice very nasal and-if-you're-irritated-by-me-now-just-imagine-what-it'd-be-like-if-I-spoke-nasally!" This last part was spoken so fast it was almost garbled.

There was a pause, in which everyone in the room seemed not to be breathing, and then the tension was gone as soon as it begun, as the guard stepped back, leading Edward down the corridor as if nothing had happened. Smugness returned, he looked round at Dominic and winked.

"He was wrong about him," he heard Poison Ivy mutter from her chair.

"What do you mean?"

"He is as crazy as he seems. You have to be to antagonise Bolton."

Gîte watched the force known as 'Bolton' walk away. He'd expected having to deal with crazy people when he'd come here. He hadn't realised that included the staff.


	3. Chapter 3

Dr. Helen Parr was stood outside in the drizzle, having a smoke before her first one-to-one session with...who was he again? Oh yes, Mr Gîte. She'd long given up any pretence of even trying to kick the habit, and to be honest there were worse vices to develop in a place like Arkham. Most of the other doctors were on self-prescribed tranquilizers just to make the job bearable; in comparison a 40-a-day habit was a minor indulgence. Then again, she'd only worked there a few years so far.

She was joined by her colleague Dr. Whistler, who also lit up. They stood and looked out at the mist slowly curling above the lake surrounding the asylum, then just as Helen was about to half-heartedly make small talk, Whistler spoke first in her thick German accent: "You were wrong by the way."

"What about?"

"Nashton and Gîte. You said the Nashton would see Gîte as a threat to his delusion of intellectual superiority, and that Gîte would take his challenges as confirmation of his inferiority."

This is shrink speak for 'they would hate each other's guts.'

"Well anyway, Nashton seems to have befriended him." Dr Parr considered this as she dropped her cigarette end on the gravel, among the many which had amassed there over the years.

"Hmm. Maybe they'll rub off on each other."

"We can only hope."

"So, Dominic. Why don't you tell me a little about yourself?"

Dominic stared at his hands. He'd been anxious about these sessions; telling your life story to a perfect stranger seemed somehow...unsavoury. Then again, he was generally anxious about a lot of things, and if there was one thing Dominic Gîte hated more than baring his soul, it was disappointing others. So he murmured the basic details of his life so far; he was born in Toronto, lived there until he was done with High School, then did what his parents wanted him to do and went to the US for his college education. When he was done with that, he got a job teaching math in Gotham High. He silently struggled to find something else to say, but the truth was nothing much had changed in his life in the past 25 years.

Dr Parr, who had listened very carefully and made notes so far, took his silence as an opportunity to ask another question. "And why did you become a math teacher?"

It wasn't a particularly probing question, but to Dominic it felt like the start of a painful dissection of his past. "I...I guess it was just the next logical step." She nodded at him to say more. "I, well I could have used my degree to get a job in financial mathematics...maybe data analysis..." he shook his head as if waking from a dream, "but no, no teaching was really my only option. Those kinds of jobs require...well they require someone better." He finished lamely.

Dr Parr flicked back in his file momentarily, and then wrote something in the margins of an older document. Why did people do that and make the paper look messy when there was more than enough lined paper in the world?

"You were top of your class at university," she pointed out.

He picked at his many hangnails. He hated to argue, but he felt the need to correct her. It was better people didn't get an inflated opinion of him based on school results alone; that way they wouldn't get disappointed. "Well yes, but you need more than good grades to get anywhere."

"What do you need?"

"I..." he felt like a politician giving a speech to a thousand cynical voters, instead of one man speaking to his therapist, "I guess you need ambition. You...you need to be able to deal with people."

"Do you think you don't have that ability?"

Dominic was far too passive to say 'I know I don't', so he just nodded. Dr Parr scribbled something else down in her notes. For a fleeting second he felt an all-consuming desire to grab the file from her and throw it out the window, because the sense of privacy which he'd so carefully cultivated over the years was being destroyed by those taunting slips of paper and _why did she have to write in the margins like that?_

The intense anger was gone as soon as he'd had time to register it, replaced with a similarly overwhelming embarrassment. He hoped to God his brief moment of animosity hadn't been picked up by the psychiatrist. But she was too absorbed in her notes to notice any changes in her patient.

No sooner had he been led to the recreation room then Nigma was at his side, asking questions once more.

"So, what do the shrinks Almighty have you say about you?" The sarcastic disdain when he spoke of the psychiatrists was unmistakable, and for a moment Dominic didn't answer, assuming he had no actual interest in his psychoanalysis. When he did answer, he floundered momentarily trying to find something from his session to talk about that wouldn't shatter what was left of his private life.

"Uh...well, Dr Parr says I have definite obsessive compulsive tendencies."

The Riddler cocked an eyebrow, and for a second Gîte was certain he'd ask him more. But then he seemed to accept the answer.

"Same here. Though I suppose yours is something dull like lining everything up, yes?"

Dominic nodded and smiled a little as Nigma went off on a diatribe about one of his many criminal exploits. If someone had told him a month ago that he'd soon be glad to have earned the friendship of a notorious super-criminal, he wouldn't have believed them. But Nigma was the only inmate who'd maintained a genuine interest in him. Granted, he gathered the Riddler took an intense interest in everyone and everything around him, but it still surprised him that a man who was famous for performing complex and intricate crimes would want to ask questions of someone who, as Scarecrow had said, was 'as gimmick-less as baking soda'.

Of course, baking soda can have a pretty explosive effect. You just have to put it with the right chemicals.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter four

Every day for a week, Dominic Gîte had watched the blonde girl hurtle down the corridor outside his cell, then sprint back again, screaming obscenities at the unfortunate guards pursuing her. Well, perhaps obscenities was a somewhat extreme way of describing words like 'Fart-breath' and 'Butt-head', but the sentiment was clear. The chase would go on, the girl evading her pursuers with feints and somersaults. But every time, just as Gîte was sure she was she was going to escape, she would seem to give up, almost as if she was bored, and allow herself to be handcuffed and taken back to her cell.

She'd been brought in a couple of weeks back. Dominic had hoped she was a new rogue, someone to take any residual attention off himself, but judging by the mix of jeer and words of encouragement, she in wasn't a newbie like himself, but an old friend who had been recaptured. He'd watched as the blonde girl was frogmarched past his cell, already in a grey, asylum issue jumpsuit, the only indication of who she was outside the asylum being the remains of a black and white painted face, smeared from her capture. Dominic supposed even that would be gone once they got her to hold still enough to apply a damp cloth to her face. He'd felt almost sorry for her, but in the middle of that thought she noticed him looking at her and yelled at him through the bars of his cell "Whadda you lookin' at?" He'd retreated back into his meagre living quarters and gone back to watching his cellmate, the Ventriloquist, sit and talk to his hand.

She'd been out of sight and, more or less, out of mind for a week, while she was kept in solitary confinement. He'd overheard some conversations (which he'd discovered was the best way to find things out without actually having to talk to someone), and had heard her referred to as 'Harley Quinn'. Once she was out of solitary however, that was when the ritual non-escapes began. Now, after having been in the asylum for almost a month, Dominic was becoming accustomed to the insane antics of his fellow inmates, but this display confused him. Why let herself be caught when she clearly had the upper hand on the people guarding her? It took him seven repeats of this before he was brave enough to ask someone. Of course, he didn't ask any members of staff; in his short time here he'd already learned if he wanted answers, he'd go to his friend Edward Nigma.

"Oh that," Nigma had said, as though it had been obvious since the start, "she's trying to get into higher security."

"Oh..." said Gîte, as perplexed as ever, "um, why?" Nigma rolled his eyes, and Gîte wondered if he was being stupid in some way.

"Because she thinks she'll get to see the Joker. Incidentally," he said, catching Harley's arm as they walked down the corridor, "you do know it has no chance in hell of working, right? Come now, even an imbecile could see what you're trying to do." Harley stuck her tongue out at him before being led in the opposite direction by a scowling member of staff. The Riddler shrugged, and Dominic followed him into the rec room. He found he spent most of his time following the Riddler around like a love-sick puppy. Or, perhaps more appropriately, a shadow. Well, at least hanging around the Riddler meant his many unvoiced questions got answered anyway, courtesy of the fact that he just talked so much.

For instance, as they sat down (on the same couch they sat on every morning. Both men were fond of consistency), Dominic was wondering how exactly the security levels worked. He supposed the staff were wary about giving even seemingly innocuous patients like him too much information, lest it be used in a breakout. But just as he was resigning himself to not knowing, Nigma started chattering about it. The Riddler seemed to know a lot of things that ought to have remained secret.

"Okay, here's how things work round here. There are four levels of security: low, medium – that's us by the way – high and extra-high, the latter of which is rumoured to have been created especially with the Joker in mind. Just so you know," and now he eyed Dominic significantly, "it's rare you see someone here in medium that doesn't have some sort of...public persona. You see, if the press found out we were on low security, they'd go ballistic over us not being," he inserted the finger quotes, "'properly secure'."

This invoked a laugh from Crane, who was listening in from behind his outdated newspaper, as though his Edward had referenced an in-joke. Gîte glanced quizzically at him, and Edward said "Oh he just finds it funny that the press still thinks this place is secure at all. Honestly, next time I break out I may have to make it more difficult to prevent boredom setting in.

"Anyway," he continued, "this means that those who aren't dangerous enough to go on high security, myself included since I prefer to use my mind rather than brute strength..."

Again, Crane snickered out loud to himself, although this time the laughter was considerably more derisive.

"_As I was saying_, if we don't go in high then we invariably get put in medium. You find most of the, well, _unmasked_ patients get shuffled down to low." His mouth twisted into a cynical smirk. "The beloved folks who run this place clearly think they have more to gain from investing in those of us that the press are interested in. It's why Zsasz – oh he's high security, you won't have met him – isn't rotting in Blackgate with all the other serial killers. Because he has his tally marks, something with which to distinguish him. Other than that he's just a murderer, and a messy one at that.

He shrugged. "C'est la vie. And people wonder why more and more people are donning Halloween costumes every time they commit a crime. Honestly, at least when Crane and I started it was original.

"So what did you do that makes you so special?" The unexpected shift from his tract about Gotham to this knocked Dominic off balance, and for a second he just stared slack-jawedly at Edward.

He seemed to take this for incomprehension. "How did Dominic Gîte, someone so conspicuously gimmick-less that I'm sure some of the folks at Blackgate could give you a run for your money, end up in here with Scarecrow, The Ventriloquist, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn and The Riddler?"

Panic seized Dominic in a breath stealing grip. This wasn't happening, he couldn't talk about _that_, why did people _always _ask? Police, doctors and now even his fellow inmates! He opened his mouth to try and formulate some sort of reply, but the words still wouldn't come.

Nigma laughed at his gormless expression, making Gîte wonder for the umpteenth time why he still regarded him as a friend. "Oh don't get yourself in a twist; that was at least partially rhetorical. But just bear in mind: I will find out. I always do."


End file.
